Landing Approach Fisheyed

January 27, 2013

Landing Approach Fisheyed Final

The end of the runway for Arrecife Airport, Lanzarote is on the coast. Between the sea and the Perimeter fence there is a footway and cyclepath which runs between Puerto del Carmen and Arrecife. This is a brilliant location to get shots of planes roaring in to land about 50ft overhead. You might call it a hot spot for Lanzarote Tourists.

This was one of those occasions when a plan comes together. I had taken shots here before but never looking directly up because the planes over fill a 10mm wide angle field of view. This time I took the fisheye lens with the aim of getting a dramatic overhead shot.

Usually I would edit out anything distracting right in the corner of an image. In this case I decided to leave in the face of the man looking up as it provides a good connection.

The camera used was a Sony A700 with a Samyang 8mm fisheye lens. The image was opened in Camera Raw and 2 additional images were created at -2EV and +2EV for a “false HDR”. The 3 raw images were opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs.

Photoshop

Topaz adjust was used with Vibrance presets group with clarity preset to increase the detail on the plane and in the clouds. With Topaz applied on a layer a layer mask was used to exclude the effect from the sun.

An adjustment was made to levels to enhance with a layer mask to exclude the sun.

Vibrance increased 25 points.

Slight decrease in Saturation blues to tone down an over done blue sky.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening and noise reduction.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening..

The healing brush and clone brush were used to remove sensor dust marks. The landing lights structure a small part of which was visible at the bottom of the image was removed as it was a distraction to the composition. A flare point on the underside of one engine was also removed with the content aware healing brush.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result.